Tag Archives: weather

I used to be a daily journaler. I would write almost every night before I went to bed. Nothing was off-limits. Daily events, feelings, ideas, stories, poetry… I wrote in French and in English. I wrote meditations and quotes. I wrote a lot. It was my way of processing what was happening in my world, and was incredibly important to me. I wrote for almost 20 years, and have a box of journals full of these writings. Then, when Jer and I moved in together, I kinda stopped writing. I didn’t need to write things down to process them, because I had this partner who would do it with me. So I stopped. Sometimes I miss it, but not often because our lives are so full. But what I did miss was the routine, and the remembering. I missed being able to go back and read about where I was at and when, especially the fun bits.

And then, almost 5 years ago, one of our aunts bought us this lovely little 5 year journal. It was a delightful gift, and it’s been 4 and a half years that we’ve been writing in it, almost daily. We write about funny things (like when Jeremy makes the bedroom smell really bad), serious things (like when wildlife comes and eats our chickens), daily happenings (like parties and beach swims and visits from friends), but mostly we write about farmy things. When things are planted, when they’re harvested, when certain flowers start to bloom. We write about the weather and the first and last frost. What this means is that when people talk about how far behind or ahead we are, I can either agree or disagree, and I actually have data to back it up… 4 years of data, which isn’t much, but it’s something! So I can tell you that we were eating lots of strawberries this time last year and we were cutting our first lilies. Lilies this year are weeks away, and our first strawberries are just starting to pink up. In other words? We’re totally 2 or 3 weeks behind the past few year. Drat.

Other news? June is the month of visitors! A lovely friend that I met 9 years ago at a Vipassana meditation in Bolivia is here for a month with her husband and 8-month old son, as part of their jaunt around the world. It’s been super fun to catch up, go for swims and spend time on the farm together. It’s also lovely to spend so much time with another babe… I’m sure Patryn agrees!

So I’ve been writing this post in my head over the past few days, while weeding the strawberries of nettles (I am, by no means, against the nettle plant. I am, however, against all sharp and spiny and stingy [not stingy as in miserly, but sting-y, as in nettle-y] plants interspersed with my berries or my flowers. NOT FAIR.), or while formatting pictures for this poster I had to do for school, or while driving up and down that island beside this island. So I have ideas about this post, but they’re all pretty meandering. I would not be surprised if the post is the same, even if it makes a claim to be a list. Just thought you should know.

Climbing rose

Kerri’s top 10 Spring break activities that actually happened

10. Finishing my poster. I had to do this poster for my Master’s. It took way longer than I thought it would. I finished it. It was pretty. It felt good. Now I have this poster that I spent 2 days making and I don’t know what to do with it. I guess there is always the woodstove.

Baby asparagus. Only 2 more years!

9.I got my haircut. I’ve been wanting to cut my hair for a long time. My mom told me not to shave any parts of it. Then she said that I shouldn’t listen to her. So I didn’t.

8. Weeding the strawberries of nettles. Also the blueberries of wild blackberry. While I, for the most part, enjoy weeding, I especially enjoy weeding when the roots are really long and tangly, and the ground is pretty soft, and the weeds themselves are pretty big. I like getting a big pile of weeds without a lot of work, especially when a significant part of that pile is root mass. I get enjoyment out of it similar to the enjoyment I get when I pop an awesome pimple. You should try it sometime. The weeding part I mean. We have lots of blackberries you can try it on, anytime.

Tractor sign.

7. Beer on a patio. In the sun. A whole lot of years (6? 7? I don’t remember) Jer and I went on our first date on Easter weekend. We had beers on a patio in the sunshine. A seagull shat in my beer. Friends joined us and things got raucous. It was an amazing day. This was not that, but it was beers, on a patio, in the sun, with friends. In April. Win.

Jeremy made me alder buttons for my sweater. I win.

6. Fancy cocktails with friendfamily in the city. I like fancy cocktails. I like beer too, but fancy cocktails are special, and when we were in Calgary we went out with my cousin to a hip place and got to pretend that we weren’t bumpkins for a few hours, and there was a painting of a turtle in a suit, and we drank cocktails with names like “The Dirty Pigeon” (with tamarind and a salty cucumber!) and “The Meat Hook” and “Corn and Oil” and it was a lot of fun. It made me feel young.

I made me a sweater. It’s orange. It has handmade, homegrown buttons on it. Seriously. I win.

5. Rock and stick throwing parties. When we got our land stumped last year, a bunch of rocks came to the surface. Some sticks too. Then Jer bought a tractor. Rocks and tractors don’t get along so well, so I decided to have a rock and stick throwing party. I thought friends would figure that I wanted them to work for me for free. They didn’t. One of them even googled “rock and stick throwing party” before deciding that it was probably a weird Denman Island thing, and hoped that it wasn’t going to be too competitive… I think it’s awesome that my friends trust me enough that I can host a work party with an unclear name and they’ll come and work… before going to the beach and drinking beer in the sun.

See? Homemade sweater, homegrown buttons. Orange. WIN.

4. Planting all of the flowers. Well, not ALL of the flowers. But lots of trays of the flowers, and 2 50-foot rows of the flowers, and there are still all of the flowers coming in the mail. My lilies are dividing and conquering and growing tall, and my starts are starting and they’re coming. It’s going to happen! Be ready for all of the flowers!

“Goats, eating fire-starter”. Almost “Goats, on a fire.”

3. No diggity by a campfire. In harmony. On an acoustic guitar. That is all.

2. Hiking in the mountains. In the sunshine. On Vancouver Island with a friend and in Canmore with my mom. To lakes. In the sunshine.

The rhubarb is growing!

1. Not working, and especially not commuting. Do you know how much time I would have in my life if I didn’t spend 5 days a week going to work? I could ACTUALLY plant all of the flowers. The blackberries would be exiled to the fences. The nettles to beyond the fences. I would knit all of the sweaters and blankets and shawls and hats and socks. I would hike all of the mountains. I would drink all of the cocktails and sleep in for all of the mornings. Until at least 7. I would miss my job, as I do (a little) right now, especially after drinking all of the cocktails and buying all of the yarn for all of the sweaters. I would miss my job, but one of the best things about having a job is the days you don’t have to go.

This carrot top was haunted. Naturally. As in we didn’t carve that face.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s rained a lot over here on the west coast as of late. We got over 300 mm of rain in 36 hours last week, and another rain warning came in yesterday. 300 mm of rain is enough to make a big mess. Our neighbours’ driveway washed out, a bunch of trees came down because the ground was just too saturated with water, and the town of Courtenay declared a state of emergency. Thank goodness we had just had the big maple that kept dropping branches on our driveway taken down, because I wonder whether it would have fallen (on our house) in the storm. I kept waiting for school to be cancelled, but it wasn’t. Anyways, after all of that rain, a day of sunshine seemed like an incredible miracle. That was today. It was sunny. It was miraculous. We went for a walk. In the sunshine. With our friends. Being on vacation is awesome.

Things that aren’t awesome are dick roosters who attack people who are here visiting, and then attack me on the bottom of my foot so I step on them and then feel trapped with this angry rooster under my foot until Jeremy comes to save me. I don’t know who won that fight. I think most spectators would say that the rooster won, even though I was the one stepping on him. When we’re eating him for dinner, maybe then I’ll have won.

Another thing that isn’t awesome is a hawk eating our chickens. After the dick rooster incident we found a pile of feathers. Then we found a half-eaten chicken. Damn.

Other things that are awesome include everything. Jeremy let me get the Christmas tree I wanted this year, and it’s so tall that, after we cut a foot off the bottom, it extends into our skylight. It’s amazing. Plus, I have an amazing job, an amazing partner, an amazing dog (she did NOT eat this chicken. This isn’t one of those “we think it’s a hawk but really it’s our dog” chicken deaths), an amazing family, amazing friends, and am just pretty darn lucky all the time.

I didn’t disappear, I promise. I was here, all along, just writing (and reading) other things… lesson plans, year plans, essays, literature reviews… Summer vacation ended (and boy, when it decided to end it ended FAST) and I got busy. Who knew that having a full-time job and a farm and doing my Master’s was going to be a lot of work?

But I handed in my first significant assignment on Friday, and I have my week planned at school, and yesterday it rained so I knit and knit and started to warp my loom, and then today I got to play outside. It was sunny (SUNNY!) and it’s still sunny and I dug potatoes and dug gladiolas and walked to my neighbours’ and I had coffee and got vitamin D from the sun instead of from a bottle.

Jer grew this amazing corn this year – it’s called Painted Mountain – and it’s a dried corn that’s supposed to be good for making cornmeal. What it’s REALLY good for is being absolutely stunning. Like STUNNING. If I was corn, I would be this corn, and I would rotate through different colours every day of the week.

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Imagine eating cornbread that looked like this.

Our cheepcheeps have grown into brawkbrawks and the one that I thought was a rooster turned out to be a…

rooster. His name is Rosco. The hens started laying eggs this week and they’re wee and I like them. Soon we’re going to have more eggs than we know what to do with. I’m going to end there, and post some pictures, and hopefully I’ll have something else to write about, that doesn’t involve quotations and references and weird verb tenses before 5 weeks from now.

Jeremy left today to go to Powell River for his uncle’s birthday. We’d decided a while back that I would stay behind, do the market, hang with Mia and get some quality alone time in. Sounds like a fantastic plan. I think it was probably my plan. Totally fantastic plan. I often come up with these “fantastic” plans… plans that would be fantastic if everything went the way I imagined in my head. I imagined a leisurely Friday harvest in dappled sunshine. I imagined the perfectly clean vegetables in perfectly clean bins in the creek, waiting for me to wake up Saturday morning and load them in the perfectly dry truck. I imagined coffee and cake. I imagined knitting. I think I always imagine knitting.

* Please realise that there is no cake, and there is rarely cake on Saturday mornings. Also, please realise that the vegetables are NEVER perfectly clean, nor are the bins, and the truck is never either perfectly clean NOR dry. I don’t know which set of elves was supposed to ensure the plan went off as I imagined, but they obviously didn’t get the memo, because…

There was no dappled sunshine. That’s really where everything started to go wrong. There was rain. And not just pitter patter rain. Torrential downpour rain that caused everyone I know to wake at midnight and question whether we were finally being invaded by whomever invades our nightmares. This wasn’t an August rain. This was a January rain. Jer and I weren’t expecting a January rain in August. The truck’s windows were all open. The tailgate was down. The hammock and pillow were out. So were tools, and bins, and bikes, and boxes of canning, meticulously labelled.

Now don’t get me wrong… we needed the rain. The veggies needed the rain, and Jer and I needed it. It makes going away (both him this weekend, and the two of us together on Tuesday) WAY easier. It makes the trees happy, and it makes our fellow islanders who were running low on water breathe a little easier. It’s good for the birds and all of those other critters. But it bloody well sucks for harvesting, and it sure made a big old mess. The house is FULL of stuff in various stages of drying. The truck is soaking wet, and will hopefully dry out before winter. I changed my clothes 4 times today. The first 3 sets are lying in a pile in the laundry room. I kept thinking I was done harvesting, but the harvest just didn’t want to end… especially after Jer left. Now I just hope that it doesn’t rain at the market tomorrow, because that really isn’t as much fun as… well… as the market in the sunshine.

Which one does not belong?

One of my students gave me a package of this seed for Christmas… how amazing.

Summer vacation is a bit of an oxymoron around these parts… summer is the furthest thing from a vacation on a farm, especially with the growing season that we’ve been having. As long as we keep everything watered (and by we, I mean Jeremy), which takes at least 3 hours a day, we are going to continue to have an incredible amount of food. We’ve come to that part of the season where there’s hope for new spinach and radishes and turnips, but all of the delicious fruits and vegetables full of sugar are ripening too. I could write an ode to the perfect tomato, but I won’t. Maybe you should instead.

Anyways, about that vacation thing. Sure, I take some time off in the summer. I read lots (in the heat of the day), swim lots (in the heat of the day), and spend time with friends (often in the heat of the day). But our alarm goes off at 6 am and I spend a lot of hours working. I am not on summer vacation for at least 4 hours and often 6, every day. Except, of course, for Pickathon.

Pickathon IS my summer vacation. It’s when I get to go away and reflect fondly on being a farmer and being a teacher, but when I don’t have to actually BE either of those things. It’s a music festival outside of Portland, and I’ve been for the past 3 years. I get to bask in the sun and swim in the river and listen to music and dance and sometimes even enjoy a mash pit. I wasn’t sure I was going to get a summer vacation this year, but I did, and it was awesome. I’m going to hold out hope that I can do it again next year, in the midst of my Master’s, but we’ll see…

And, as is true with most vacations, coming home was one of the best parts. My dahlias are starting to bloom, and EVERYTHING is ripe. Beans, tomatoes, basil, onions, cucumbers, peppers, the endless zucchini. We pickled zucchini today. We have zucchini cake in our freezer and had zucchini pancakes with zucchini relish as a garnish the other day for dinner… so far we’ve stayed on top of our zucchini, but this is going to become increasingly difficult as we begin to experience a glut of other things, especially tomatoes. We even had our first corn this week… but that might be a secret, because I don’t know if we have enough to share, so don’t tell.

But one of the other things about coming home from my summer vacation is just that… that I’m home, which means that my summer vacation is over (many of you know that Jeremy and I happen to go on a kayak trip every summer as well, but we do that together, so that’s OUR vacation… here I am strictly speaking about MY vacation… obviously). Which, of course it isn’t… but it is. There’s crazy things starting to happen outside, and the crickets are only a small part of it. I can pretend to notice that the days aren’t getting shorter, or that the mornings don’t have a bit of a chill-factor to them, or that it’s AUGUST 10TH ALREADY. I can pretend not to see pumpkins turning orange or apples starting to ripen… I can pretend a lot of things, but the quantity of things is starting to arrive at that precipitous place where I don’t know how much longer I can pretend for…

So in this moment, I’m going to go do more vacation things, like read my book (Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver) and knit socks. Tonight I’ll do more farm things. I am certainly NOT going to do school-year things like wash my feet or have a shower. There really aren’t that many more days when I’m allowed to have feet that look the way mine do, and I’m going to take advantage of every single one of them that I have.

I was lying in bed early this morning, wishing that I was sleeping, trying really hard not to think about how I don’t have a job for next year and failing miserably. I decided, as I have many times in similar situations, that I really need to start meditating again. I remembered the place I was in in the spring of 2008 and how 10 days of silence, attempting to clear my mind and feel everything in equanimity changed that place. I remembered the peace and the feeling of satisfaction that spread through me. So I sat up and spent 10 minutes trying to find that place… then I heard the coffee percolating downstairs and whatever clarity I was muddling towards vanished and was replaced with the fog that precedes my morning coffee. So I got up and drank my coffee and forgot about meditating, and about not having a job for that matter.

I ended up in the garden, and wandered around aimlessly for a bit. Jer was gone for the morning, and as I haven’t been around a lot lately, physically or mentally, I am not sure of the priorities. I know that blueberries are to be dug, I know that everything is to be watered, I know that lots of things are to be seeded or transplanted, but I don’t know what or where or how to do it so that it doesn’t have to be done again. So I sat down to weed the onions. I pulled grass and buttercup and thistles and bindweed, and I did it slowly and peacefully (if one can call causing the death of many living plants peaceful). I got dirt under my fingernails and between my toes and it made me feel better. Not all better better, but some better.

I went to get a massage recently because my carpal tunnel, caused by treeplanting, compounded by knitting, revigorated by gardening has flared. My massage therapist asked me what it feels like when I stop knitting and stop gardening. I looked at her questioningly… stopped knitting? Stopped? Like took a break? I knit when I read, when I play cards, when I’m sitting on the ferry. Sometimes I knit at red lights. Stop? It made me think about whether I glorify the act of being busy, but I don’t think I do. I choose to do slow things, like knitting and growing organic food. I choose to sit on my bum and weed onions by hand. I choose to do lots of things that keep me busy, but they’re meditative for me. I don’t know if actual meditation – the kind I did in Bolivia, sitting still for an hour to clear my mind – is what I need. I think I just need to get dirt under my fingernails every day.

Here’s some pictures.

The canning season has begun!

The pictures pretty much tell the story of our lives lately – it’s been hot, so Jer jumped in the pond. Some plants are doing well, but it’s hot and dry, so lots of others are struggling through. The kale’s not so juicy, and the salad greens are confused. We had our first farmer’s market of the year, but for a long variety of reasons we didn’t have many vegetables… so we made jam. Frogs are filling up the pond, and that’s about all of the exciting details!